What the ads don’t say is that those placement rates generally don’t include all graduates. They typically exclude foreign graduates who can’t work in the United States and sometimes exclude U.S. students who are deemed to be not looking for work. Graduates with jobs might include those with part-time work, internships or a position with the coding camp itself. Change the metrics, and the placement rates might not look so impressive.

Student Edmund To (left), 31, talks with career coach Marlene Tang at Hack Reactor, a leading computer coding camp.

Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle

Most are for-profit schools, and several have been acquired by big for-profit education chains. No stand-alone camps are accredited, which means students can’t get federal grants or loans. However, the U.S. Department of Education has just started a tiny pilot program that would let students get financial aid for coding camps that form a partnership with an accredited college.

There are at least 13 immersive coding camps in San Francisco, but none seems to be using the same formula to calculate its placement statistics, at least not yet.

The California Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education, which regulates for-profit colleges and trade schools, requires them to use a standard way of calculating graduation, job-placement and salary data so consumers can get an apples-to-apples comparison. Schools must publish these stats in a student performance fact sheet. The fact sheet must be filed as part of the school’s annual report with the bureau, posted on the school’s website and provided to prospective students.

But the bureau has approved only five schools it identified as coding camps — Dev Bootcamp, General Assembly, Sabio, Galvanize and Hackbright Academy. Of these, only Dev has a fact sheet on file with the bureau because it was the first one approved.

Student Edmund To, top, talks with career coach Marlene Tang at Hack Reactor in San Francisco, where a student, above, rests during a lunch break.

Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle

Dev’s latest fact sheet for San Francisco covers 348 people who graduated in 2014. Fact sheets for 2015 aren’t due until December. Schools that got approved this year won’t have to file a fact sheet until December 2017.

In the meantime, prospective students should look carefully into any claims made by coding camps.

Reactor Core, the San Francisco parent company of Hack Reactor, MakerSquare and Telegraph Academy, is trying to get competitors to adopt a methodology for reporting student outcomes that it designed. None has, other than its own schools.

Here’s how HackReactor came up with its 98 percent placement rate: It said that last year 482 students started the program and 13 dropped out, leaving 469 graduates. Of those, it exempted 95 students from job placement stats because they were not U.S. citizens or legal residents (36), were not looking for a job (36), were employed by the school (12) or started a company (11).

Of the remaining 374 students, it said that 367 — 98 percent — found a full-time programming-related job (of which five were internships) within six months.

For salary data, Hack Reactor used the highest offer each graduate received. To come up with its $104,000 average salary, it had to estimate pay for three students.

If no wage data were available for a “successfully placed student,” it used the “value closest to 50th percentile available salary information” for that job.

Reactor Core is not licensed by the bureau, but its application is pending, bureau chief Joanne Wenzel said. The company had an accounting firm confirm that its report was prepared according to Reactor Core’s methodology.

Dev Bootcamp, now owned by Kaplan Inc., doesn’t advertise its job-placement rates. According to its performance fact sheet, its San Francisco campus enrolled 365 students in 2014. Of those, 348 graduated, but only 258 were available for employment. Of those, 243 — 94 percent — got jobs or internships, although 14 were less than 32 hours a week.

Of the 140 graduates who reported salary data, 101 made between $58,000 and $95,000 per year, 22 made less and 17 made more.

The bureau lets schools count graduates as unavailable for employment only if they died, went to jail, were called to active military duty, couldn’t work legally in the United States or continued their education. Schools must come up with a legitimate method to track how many students get jobs. If they can’t find out whether a student got work, they must count the student as not employed; they can’t be thrown out of the equation. If they can verify employment but can’t get salary data, they can still count the graduate as employed.

On July 14, the bureau adopted new regulations that will tighten many reporting requirements, including what constitutes “gainful employment.” It also changed, from August to December, the deadline for reporting data from the previous year.

General Assembly is from New York but has a large campus in San Francisco. It has not filed its report for 2015 with the bureau but has posted it on its website.

Although it has fact sheets for 19 full- and part-time programs in San Francisco, only two have graduation and salary data for 2015. These two — User Experience Design Immersive and Web Development Immersive — reported placement rates of 98 percent.

Although 441 students graduated from those two programs combined, its 98 percent graduation rate was based on 295 students it deemed “available for employment.”

When I asked General Assembly about the 146 students deemed unavailable for employment, spokeswoman Marissa Arnold said, “We have a new analytics team. For 2015 it looks like they relied on our definition of ‘available for employment,’ rather than what is mandated by law.” Its definition allowed more students to be deemed unavailable.

She called it “an honest mistake” that will be corrected. When it’s fixed, those placement rates “will definitely come down,” she said.

App Academy did not return requests for comment on placement and salary claims. In lieu of tuition, most graduates of its 12-week immersive program pay 18 percent of their first-year salary.

On its website, Coding Dojo says it has an “over 90 percent hire rate,” but does not offer details. In an email, the company said, “Immediately after graduating from Coding Dojo’s 14-week, three-stack in-person coding program, the career services team asks the graduate to opt in for our career services program. If they do opt in, we consider them a job seeker” and follow up to see if they’ve landed an information technology job. “In 2015, 89 percent of the students who opted in ... received an IT job within four months of graduation” and 97 percent got an IT job within six months.

Kathleen Pender writes the Net Worth column in The San Francisco Chronicle. She explains how the big business and economic news of the day affect a household's net worth. She covers saving, investing, debt, taxes, housing, mortgages, retirement plans, employment and unemployment with a focus on issues specific to California and the Bay Area.

When it comes to big financial decisions, she believes that the simplest answer is almost always the best and that people would stay out of money trouble if they didn't get involved in things they can't understand. Pender welcomes questions from readers and frequently answers them in her column.

She majored in business journalism at the University of Missouri-Columbia and was a Knight-Bagehot fellow in business journalism at Columbia University.